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Trends

One of the big stories of next year might be decentralization. Decentralization is what it sounds like: pushing centralized processes and decision-making to the periphery, where it is believed people can be more effective at dealing with whatever is on tap. Western democratic capitalism runs circles around Soviet style centralized command-and-control economics.

Business-to-business firms view increased online activity as an effective way to boost their growth, according to a new report from CloudCraze. Eighty-nine percent of the 400-plus B2B decision makers CloudCraze surveyed in the United States and Europe expected digital commerce would help their businesses grow. E-commerce has altered the role of sales teams, the CloudCraze survey also suggests.

Corporate executives know that if they don’t transform their companies into digital enterprises they’re going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage. Yet many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. Many executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting cloud-based applications and services.

A decade ago, there wasn’t much talk about self-driving cars or autonomous-cars, but Toyota and Lexus were setting the stage with their self-parking cars. They aired television commercials showing how cars magically parallel-parked themselves. At the time, it seemed amazing, but that was nothing compared to what’s coming next. The self-parking revolution is now expanding.

In-home broadband has become “the fourth utility” in United States households, many of which have multiple connected devices and viewing screens. More than 85 percent of U.S. homes have broadband service, according to Parks Associates, 93 percent of those have DSL, fiber or cable high-speed, fixed-line Internet services. Fixed broadband demand is a key contributor to operators’ ongoing profits.

Most retailers don’t have the in-store technology to view customer information across various touchpoints, suggests a new study from Kibo. Fifty-eight percent of retailers who participated in the study, released last Thursday, acknowledged they did not have that capability. The study was based on questions posed to 115 retail executives during the Future Stores 2017 conference.

Here’s a disturbing thought: A RoboCEO powered by artificial intelligence — possibly based on IBM’s Watson — could be running some companies within the next decade. Not every company will warm to the idea, to be sure, but it’s conceivable that the practice could begin. This idea has started to bubble to the surface, with leaders like Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma apparently taking it seriously.

The artificial intelligence speaker war is now being waged, and it is escalating. Today you can choose between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Harman Kardon’s Invoke is coming this fall. By the end of the year, Apple’s HomePod will be competing in the market, and Samsung has indicated it will join the fray as well. With all these choices, how can you determine which smart speaker is right for you?

Businesses have been focusing on the Internet of Things as an enabler of growth and increased operational efficiency, as well as the means to provide a better experience to customers and partners, according to the State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017 report Verizon released this week. Seventy-three percent of executives surveyed said they either were researching or currently deploying IoT.

The enterprise SaaS market grew 31 percent year over year, totaling almost $15 billion in revenue in Q2 2017, according to Synergy Research. Collaboration was the highest growth segment. Microsoft is the clear leader in overall enterprise SaaS revenues, having overtaken Salesforce a year ago. Microsoft’s acquisition last year of LinkedIn gave its SaaS operations a significant boost.

Brick-and-mortar retailers have been finding it difficult to offer pricing that’s competitive with e-commerce sites, which have the advantage of massive scope and scale, according to a report Frost & Sullivan’s Stratecast service released Wednesday. E-commerce will account for nearly 18 percent of the total retail market by 2025, the report projects.

Mobile app use has become a powerful habit among U.S. consumers, based on new research findings. An increasing number of users have been spending their time consuming video, music and social media on smartphones and other mobile devices, but many are reluctant to try new apps. A large percentage of mobile app users’ time is spent on apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter or Instagram.

As the healthcare industry shifts to value-based care models, patient education and communication solutions increasingly have become an investment priority for care providers and payers. Consumers have many means, whether digital or analog, to acquire medical knowledge and personal health information, and they tend to reach out to their doctor when sick, or when they have complex health questions.

As an industry, CRM continues to grow and shower benefits on its users. It’s hard to imagine that some businesses still don’t use some form of CRM, but recent data suggests there are still businesses buying their first CRM solutions or changing vendors. It’s a compilation of data from all over, with some credible inputs from a number of sources, so it’s worth taking a look.

The omnichannel approach has become a byword in customer service, but retailers need to do more to make it happen, based on a recent study. Researchers tested 57 metrics across desktop, mobile and in-store buying touchpoints to evaluate the end-to-end omnichannel experience at 30 popular and growing retailers. Here’s the problem: E-commerce absolutely is killing brick-and-mortar stores.

Although many organizations recognize that agility enables better responses to changing business conditions, few have taken the necessary steps to reach that goal, a new study from CA Technologies suggests. Although two-thirds of the respondents to the firm’s recent survey saw value in business agility, only about 12 percent said their organizations were on their way to achieving it.

Voice computing is replacing the graphical user interface, Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, said early this year at CES. Digital assistants will be integrated into many household objects, he noted. About 5 million voice-activated digital voice products had been sold as of January, and Bravac estimated 5 million more would be sold this year.

The age of connected and intelligent systems has been a subject of intense media coverage and hot debate, but the implications will be much greater than many have forecast. Most predictions paint a rather bleak picture for lower-income blue collar jobs. Many will be replaced with automation resulting from the combination of advanced sensor, connectivity, processing, robotics and AI technologies.

You’re probably tired of reading that the Internet of Things is the hottest thing going, and that IoT is a boon to technology and, simultaneously, a potential disaster for security and privacy. However, over the past few years, another IoT-related technology has been growing: vehicle to vehicle. V2V is a way for automobiles to communicate directly with other vehicles on the road.

Customers want fast service or support from knowledgeable people where, when and how they prefer to receive it, based on results of a study the CMO Council published Tuesday. Together with SAP Hybris, the CMO Council last year conducted an online survey of 2,000 respondents, equally divided between men and women. Fifty percent were in the U.S., and 25 percent each resided in Canada and Europe.

As many as 80 percent of U.S. residents support frictionless payment methods and technologies, suggests a survey of 1,000 consumers Viewpost published this week. Among its other findings:
Nearly 51 percent of survey participants were paid electronically through direct deposit, and
83 percent of respondents believed paper checks would be eliminated completely within the next 20 years.

Membership in loyalty programs grew at 15 percent this year to total 3.8 billion, according to the recently published 2017 Colloquy Loyalty Census Report. The growth rate recorded in the 2015 loyalty census, when membership stood at 3.3 billion, was 26 percent. Growth has slowed because the United States is a maturing market, said Melissa Fruend, author of the report.

Eighty percent of participants in a recent Capgemini survey said they would pay more for a better customer experience, and 9 percent were willing to pay up to 50 percent more. Researchers polled 3,300 customers of 125 companies in the utilities, consumer products, retail, retail banking, and Internet-based services sectors. Among the respondents were 450 senior executives from 150 companies.

So much is happening as we approach the end of Q2 — our industry’s busiest quarter, at least by some measures. I’m flying around seeing things but not always able to comment from a middle seat on a red-eye. So this piece is an attempt to catch up and set some markers for the traditionally slower summer. I’ve been searching for a word to describe a new category I see: Service as a Service.

FinancialForce held its first big time user conference in Las Vegas last week, headlined by new CEO Tod Nielsen. The company seems to be telling us that it is adjusting course in an effort to create a new category aligned with enterprise resource planning, but very much for this century. The key concept is services, which must be explained.

There recently has been an erosion in penetration of pay-TV subscriptions in the United States. They have fallen from a high of 86 percent in 2014 to 83 percent in early 2017, based on Parks Associates recent consumer research. Despite signs in late 2015 and early 2016 that the U.S. cable TV industry finally had reversed years of subscriber losses, the numbers declined again.

Influencer marketing has become an area of strategic importance for marketing departments, according to Traackr. B2B technology companies are aware of the trend, according to the paper’s coauthor, business consultant Mark Schaefer, but they lag in implementing influencer marketing programs. Interviews with 10 marketing experts suggest that influencer marketing requires a fundamental shift.

More than 80 percent of high-growth sales organizations use five or more sales technologies, suggests a recent online survey of 400 companies. Velocify and the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals partnered on the research and released their findings on Tuesday. The average number of sales technologies in use was 10, based on the participants’ reports.